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What nuggets of wisdom and truth are there to mine from this rock? There are more than this, but this specifically is worth pointing out:

These boys will be allowed to forget everything but their own immediate feelings for as long as society allows them, and this society allows straight white boys to dodge personal and emotional responsibility until at least the age of 70.

Big part of the problem right there. Society and the left have failed at this level, and so has the right. It seems to me to be systemic. Parents matter. A lot. But not even some parents know how to teach personal and emotional responsibility because they weren’t taught it themselves.

Many of us grew up trying to be the everyman–the one who can do everything by himself. The one who can tough it out. The one who doesn’t need to depend on anyone to make it. Some of the kids and young men I know today are chasing after this fantasy, because they believe that if they don’t, they’re not real men. That they don’t have what it takes.

But it’s not true. Human beings were designed to be dependent upon one another. Not co-dependent, but dependent. We were designed to engage with our emotions, not suppress them. Both men and women.

On the left, this radical deification of autonomy as the supreme American value has resulted in, to varying degrees, a non-falsifiable belief in one’s own righteousness that demeans others who are different as a form of virtue signalling. In doing so it has inculcated a deep, secret fear in its advocates that they could be judged as bad people if they show any weakness by diverting from the approved set of sacred beliefs. It has led to the creation of safe spaces designed as a defense against negative emotions like shame and fear, but prevents today’s kids from learning how to healthily process them. A judgment-free zone has arisen where correctly diagnosing mental unwellness and imbalance in order to restore the true self is thought of as a denial of one’s real self. Here I am speaking of the kind of thing that happens when one’s feeling of who they are does not match what their body tells them they are. As an example, transableism is gaining traction as a socially-acceptable identity, which is a belief that one should not have a completely functioning body, and where people seek instead to intentionally become disabled in some respect.

On the right, this same deification of autonomy has resulted in an individualistic twisted version of John Wayne’s machismo that demeans others who are different as a form of masculine strength. In doing so it has inculcated a deep, secret fear in young men that they could be judged as unworthy of manhood if they show any emotion or speak about women respectfully in front of their peers when women aren’t around. It has created a culture that has embraced spite and mockery as an acceptable, even heroic response to the antics of the illiberal wing of the leftist progressive movement, and in doing so prevents men and women from healthily channeling their frustrations. A culture of cruelty and revenge has arisen in the place of the belief in the equal worth and dignity of all humankind.

The results on both the left and right are, in reality, interlinked. Each finds in the other part of its cause. And everywhere these things have created fractured individuals who are, perhaps permanently, separated from who they really are as men and women, and from the God who gives them these true identities.

The solution, I am convinced, is pre-political. That is, the answer to this fracturing of our selves and therefore our culture lies in the form of something that did not have its genesis in politics, but rather something more essential to who we are as human beings.

Sin practiced sears your conscience, it harms your soul, and it makes you long for the very thing that will kill you. The Bible talks about that in terms of the flesh.

And so it is not the sort of thing a government or law can fix. And so we must begin to ask ourselves if the very things we see as political solutions are not in themselves sin.

Those of us who are followers of Jesus struggle daily with this sin.

Dr. Butterfield again says:

Sin distracts us. It takes us off course. We weren’t looking for it. It was looking for us, Genesis says. We weren’t intending, but it found us. Then indwelling sin manipulates us and it took a while for me to realize that my lesbianism was indwelling sin, and it was indwelling sin because I had practiced it for so long. Indwelling sin manipulates you. For me, it was a very painful reality that there was a war inside, that between the indwelling sin of my lesbian desire and my union with Christ that was new, small, and nascent, but growing.

Thus, we Christians have to be committed to an active and long-running battle against this sin. This repentance is a daily and ongoing thing. And that’s why we need a community of fellow believers who are all repenting and who are doing so transparently. Knowledge that others are struggling and that they don’t condemn us for our failures keeps us going, gives us hope, and gives us faith.

The American church has a long way to go. Being available only on Sundays isn’t going to cut it. You can’t schedule times to support one another. Church on Sundays and potlucks once a quarter aren’t enough time to know each other. Pretending you’re fine to maintain a safe emotional distance from others in that church space is no way to live.

The LGBTQ community has done wonders in this area. This community opens its doors to those who are suffering. People who have suffered as much as this community cannot help but support each other. Their homes are open day and night and they have regular, spontaneous get-togethers. They provide safe spaces for each other to be themselves and perhaps, if they’re suicidal, hang on for another day.

The LGBTQ community has much to teach the American church about how to be a community. And we have much to teach them about a God who loves them. We are both, in a sense, connected by our separation from each other. We fear each other, and hate each other’s sin, but we need each other. Our mutual sin keeps us separated from one another and from the love of Christ.

Community, it turns out, can do a lot to help invest our children with the tools they need to develop personal and emotional responsibility. But community cannot itself scale into a government. There are those who today are trying to make that happen. But no amount of laws or political willpower can create community out of a nation, because these things cannot address the individual.

But church community, especially, was designed for the individual without fracturing him or her. And this community has something no others have; a message of hope that Christ intended for the individual, a message which Christ has commanded those whom He has chosen to peaceful advocate to our enemies. It is a message that one’s self worth doesn’t reside in what one does or can do, but rather in Whom they belong to; a Person who doesn’t change, who won’t betray you, who won’t stop loving you no matter how much you screw up, yet who wants you to struggle with your sin in order to mortify it. This Father God is the one whom not even many American Christians speak about because they do not know Him well. But He is good.

…if we really live as the family of God, the watching world would see that. It would be irresistible. People are dying of loneliness. People in our churches, people in our neighborhood. It’s an agony to see so many lonely people. If the church really had an understanding of itself as a family and a deep committed calling to draw others into that, that would change everything.

That fractured self that has fractured our society? I think Dr. Butterfield knows how to fix them.

I’m seeing a troubling trend on the social justice left. After being ejected from the halls of power in America, I’m now seeing open calls to violence. It is just a small step over the line, because they are currently limited to advocating violence against open white supremacists, a deplorable lot no matter whom you ask. But this is a troubling and disturbing slippery slope. One that invites catastrophic decay. Here’s an example; a series of tweets from a fellow named @meakoopa.

every liberal democracy realizes early on there are some positions which must prima facie be aggressively excluded from public discourse

u can’t even articulate WHY they are unreasonable bc to articulate WHY they are unreasonable is to itself open the possibility of reason.

U can collapse a democracy by insisting the democracy had a right to end itself: Hindenburg to Hitler, “the peaceful transition of power.”

Intolerance cannot be tolerated, bc this corrosive effect means the law can be co-opted by, and so protective of, fascism.

Fascism wriggles into democracies by insisting on right to be heard, achieves critical mass, then dissolves the organs that installed it.

WHICH MEANS the stronger it becomes, it cannot be sufficiently combatted with reason. Bc “reason” becomes the state’s tool to enforce.

The Overton Window becomes weaponized – as we are seeing in @KellyannePolls and @seanspicer’s “alternative facts.” The state decides.

Liberalism literally cannot see this – its insistence on rule of law, not genocideal lust, is what turned the German people into good Nazis.

some positions must be excluded from discourse. Some positions you do not listen to – u can only punch.

A society that begins to entertain why some members of its polis might not belong invites catastrophic decay. Those voices must be excluded.

TL;DR – punching a nazi is actually a supreme act of democracy bc it will not tolerate a direct affront of a fellow citizen’s citizenship.

the term to interrogate in “should you punch a nazi?” is SHOULD – what is the status of that “should”? Legally: no; ethically: fuck yes.

I am troubled that when civil society doesn’t go our way, we so easily slide into hatred and violence. Even when it appears justified, like punching a Nazi giving an interview, physical acts against hateful ideas yield only more darkness, as Martin Luther King Jr. said.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness;

only light can do that.

Hate cannot drive out hate;

only love can do that.

Hate multiplies hate,

violence multiplies violence,

and toughness multiplies toughness

in a descending spiral of destruction….

The chain reaction of evil —

hate begetting hate,

wars producing more wars —

must be broken,

or we shall be plunged

into the dark abyss of annihilation.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Strength To Love, 1963

Ideas must be opposed with ideas or direct non-violent action. For the Nazi who was punched, refusing to interview him or give him a platform to speak is non-violent and pretty effective. I stand between complacent ‘do nothing-ism’ and the hatred and despair now emerging, and advocate for both refuting harmful ideas with better ones and non-violent action. The night before the Nazi got punched, a man in Seattle was shot because he was taken to be a white supremacist. He was actually a fellow protester.

Alistair Roberts said on his own blog post on the subject, “The carelessly hyperbolic rhetoric of the social justice left greases the surface of the plane of social antagonisms, enabling us to make some incredibly dangerous moves from ideological opposition towards physical violence extremely easily.”

Vigilante justice has never yielded justice. In Seattle, it led to an injustice. To embrace violence against harmful ideas is to reject Martin Luther King Jr’s more excellent way that he laid out in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. It’s persuasive for a reason. And it is now once again relevant today. Please read it.

While it is true that ideas that have contributed to evils such as genocide must be managed with care, insisting on the right to be heard is not the only way in which fascism can wriggle into a republic. It also wriggles into them by rejecting reason as useless! And in advocating for violence to silence objectionable opinion, fascism also rejects the path of Christian love and non-violent protest.

When love is rejected, frequent use of hyperbolic language (see: Twitter, Facebook) becomes the way to label those who don’t support your belief system. And when reason and non-violence are rejected, individual violence is legitimized against the more deplorable of those nonbelievers. The problem these two trends create is twofold. On the one hand, hyperbolic language has a dehumanizing and delegitimizing effect not just on the objectively inhumane and hateful speech of white supremacy, but on any other person who holds an opinion rendered unfashionable by the collective. That’s because the list of ‘nonbelievers’ inevitably expands (see Animal Farm), and each are driven out or silenced with mob violence or the threat of social repercussions.

That’s how brown shirts enabled Hitler’s rise. That’s actually how the organs of a republic are dissolved. The brown shirts didn’t ask politely for a seat at the table of public discourse and the Germans in the Weimar Republic let them sit down. They bullied their way in.

Punching a Nazi giving an interview is an act of fascism, because it already says that some members of the polis do not belong. And here’s the part meakoopa is right about; that when we entertain that some members of our society do not belong (no matter how objectionable we may find them) then that begins the “descending spiral of destruction” Martin Luther King talked about toward the catastrophic decay meakoopa talks about as we soon find out that there are still others who also do not belong. And still others. And more after that. Until there’s just us.

No justice. Just us.

“Man was born into barbarism when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience. And he has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another’s flesh.”

Is the alt-right white supremacist? I’m all for calling a spade a spade, and I will state up front that I am an enemy of white supremacy. But to draw an equal sign between that and the alt-right, we need to first explore why the term ‘alt-right’ has gained prominence and what it means. That’s because words have meaning, and the concepts they describe tend to lose meaning when we use them loosely. When we label something, it needs to be accurate. Otherwise if you go around calling just anyone you disagree with racist or white supremacist or a Nazi, you devalue what those terms mean to the larger culture, and when enough people do that, we lose sight of them to the point where they are allowed to flourish.

Paul Gottfried is credited with coining the term in 2008. He is a Jewish academic who also coined the term ‘paleoconservative’. He used the term to call for “an ‘Alternative Right’ to combat the high degree of neoconservative control over the intellectual Right.”[1]

Gottfried doesn’t consider himself part of the alt-right movement, but says, “I am ideologically closer to Altright commentators than I am to the Never-Trumpers or to the contributors to most establishment Republican websites. Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, Steve Sailer and John Derbyshire are all brilliant thinkers and writers, and I wouldn’t deny that I’ve benefited from their luminous insight. Next to them, such conservative intellectuals (by current media standards) as Max Boot, Rich Lowry, the perpetually pouting Ben Shapiro and Jonah Goldberg read like community college drop-outs.”

In the speech he gave in 2008 coining the term, Gottfried envisioned the alternative right as a unified movement of paleoconservatives dedicated to retaking the cultural position neoconservatives currently hold on the American right. [2]

According to Michael Foley via Wikipedia, an international scholar, “paleoconservatives press for restrictions on immigration, a rollback of multicultural programmes, the decentralization of the federal policy, the restoration of controls upon free trade, a greater emphasis upon economic nationalism and isolationism in the conduct of American foreign policy, and a generally revanchist outlook upon a social order in need of recovering old lines of distinction and in particular the assignment of roles in accordance with traditional categories of gender, ethnicity, and race.”[3]

Paleoconservatives claim to be the modern ideological descendants of Russel Kirk and Edmund Burke. From Wikipedia: “David Brooks, a neoconservative critic, says that paleocons do not dream of seeing slavery reborn. Instead, he concludes that they link rural communities to a transcendent order and ancient institutions:

“They do not shy away from expressing their true beliefs, and if they supported slavery they would probably say so. They merely believe in the social hierarchies. In those southern communities, they say, social roles were crucial to happiness and ordered sociability. ‘Aristotle recognized that a well-ordered society protected an ascending order of good through the institutionalization of rank’, Fleming and co-author Paul Gottfried wrote in their book The Conservative Movement. They are talking about the social pecking order in old-time towns—the folks who live on the hill, the merchants on Main Street, the village idiot on the green. On a larger scale, the paleocons contrast the virtues of the republic with the corruptions of empire. The empire throws its weight around in the world; the republic minds its own business.”

So then what do we make of Gottfried’s self-admitted ideological association to controversial alt-right figures Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, Steve Sailer and John Derbyshire? Jared Taylor is an admitted white nationalist. Brimelow has created a webzine that publishes them[4]. Sailer has repudiated them on pragmatic grounds[5] but his writings can be interpreted as having a racist undercurrent, and John Derbyshire has written positively about white supremacy.[6]

At this point I am hesitant to conclude that paleoconservatism is inherently racist, as it appears that Kirk and Burke did not write on race at all, and I am not investigating paleoconservatism in-depth for this post since that isn’t the focus, the alt-right is. But at the very least, we can certainly say that from its very conception the alternative right movement has given a sympathetic home to its racist elements and that the movement has troublesomely blended them with Kirkian and Burkean thought.

And it is this syncretism that may perhaps become a back door through which the alt-right can enter the GOP party apparatus and bend the party toward its own ends in this present Trumpian age. Movement and establishment conservatives within the party would do well to remain on guard and separate the non-racist paleoconservatives from the Sailers of the world. But I digress.

We have established that the alt-right is paleoconservative in origin with some racist elements thrown in. However, as movements do, the ideology does evolve and begins to welcome those who are not explicitly paleoconservative.

Richard Spencer comes onto the scene in 2010 and founds alternativeright.com (probably nsfw), and takes credit for shortening “Alternative Right” to alt-right. Spencer is an outspoken white nationalist and he’s the guy you saw seig heiling Trump at a white nationalist conference this week.

In 2013, the Gamergate controversy happened. Gamergate in its broad form was a reaction against leftist-progressive cultural domination, although its catalyst was allegations of nepotism that led to a favorable review of a social-justice inspired video game. Milo Yiannopoulos gained notoriety from it, publishing correspondence from the GameJournoPros mailing list implying game journalists were colluding to give negative coverage of his side of the controversy. In 2015, he was hired to be Breitbart’s Tech Editor.[7]

Yiannopolous is a self-described paleo-libertarian. These are different from paleoconservatives, who abhor libertarian ideology. Whereas paleoconservatism believes in the existence of a transcendant moral order and that the commonwealth is a natural and necessary structure that provides for human needs[3], paleolibertarians are much more individualistic while still holding to a form of social traditionalism as necessary but not transcendent, and therefore reject that governments ought to put such values into law[8].

Yiannopoulos leveraged what I’m calling “troll culture”, shamelessly and purposefully saying controversial statements online and delighting in the tizzy he was able to throw his social justice warrior opponents into. Trolls use human psychology to create these reactions. They identify exactly the sorts of things their opponents fear may be the true feelings on behalf of a silent majority, and then they say them loud and shamelessly. While there’s a benefit to it in that it keeps the purveyors of leftist-progressivism focused on combating trolls instead of furthering their ideology, the upside for trolls like Yiannopoulos and the downside for the rest of us is that we are left unable to ascertain whether or not they mean even a smidgen of what they’re saying, or whether they’re simply trying to provoke a reaction, or some combination of the two.

It is through this trolling and his position at Breitbart that Yiannopoulos provides an apologetic for the alt-right as “fun-loving provocateurs, valiant defenders of Western civilization, daring intellectuals — and a handful of neo-Nazis keen on a Final Solution 2.0, but there are only a few of them, and nobody likes them anyways.”[9]

And for many of us on the right, the fact that Yiannopoulos’s targets are social justice warriors, whom we tend to enjoy mocking as well, is a back-door through which we might be tempted to agree with him and consider him and the alt-right co-belligerents against leftist-progressive overeach. And this summer there were all manner of people who became confused about what alt-right meant because of his and other apologetics to whitewash the alt-right of its racist roots. Hugh Hewitt, before he was set straight by Jonah Goldberg, argued earlier this year that “there is a ‘narrow’ alt-right made up of a ‘execrable anti-Semitic, white supremacist fringe’ but also a ‘broad alt-right’ made up of frustrated tea partiers and others who are simply hostile to the GOP establishment and any form of immigration reform that falls short of mass deportation.[10]

But Yiannopoulos, according to Ian Tuttle, claims that Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor are the intellectuals of the alt-right[9], and it is impossible to dismiss their writings as anything but racist on their face.

Yiannopoulos also considers Nick Land an alt-right intellectual. In “The Dark Enlightenment”, Land argues that “his ‘neo-reaction’ is rooted in the same fundamental rejection of egalitarianism. The differences are less important than the similarities; the race realists call on evolutionary biology and cognitive science; Land and his followers invoke postmodern philosophy. Both, with the help of an influential Alt-Right contingent among computer scientists, draw on cognitive science. Adherents of the Alt-Right seem to think that liberal democracy was an abstraction tyrannically imposed on an unwilling populace.

“There is, then, contra Bokhari and Yiannopoulos, continuity on the Alt-Right, from the more interesting thinkers to the ‘1488ers.’ This label comes from 14, for the ’14 Words’ of neo-Nazism (‘We Must Secure the Existence of Our People and a Future for White Children’), and 88, for the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, doubled, HH, ergo ‘Heil Hitler.’ Clever, eh? Some want to put people in ovens; some just want an ability to ‘exit’ multicultural society for an ethno-national arrangement. But they’re all in agreement: ‘All men are created equal’ is not true. What follows is a 21st-century version of Blut und Boden — Blood and Soil — on one hand, or technological apocalypticism, on the other. But the two are not so different, as the Nazis understood. (And to that point, it’s telling that, as Bokhari and Yiannopoulos note, some Alt-Right thought has its roots in the thinking of Giulio Evola, a mid-century Italian philosopher whose apocalyptic vision of the world derived from his own woolly syncretism and eccentric mysticism.)”[9]

Jonah Goldberg defines the alt-right this way, and I think it’s the definition that’s gained broad acceptance since this summer: “They believe that, if you read Richard Host (sp), if you read Richard Spencer at the, who leads an alt right think tank, if you actually read the people who created the term, who have been pushing this stuff, the one thing they all agree on is that we need to organize this society on the assumption that white people are genetically superior, or that white culture is inherently superior, and that we should have either state-imposed or culturally-imposed segregation between the races, no race mixing with the lower brown people.” [11]

Now, in 2016, we see a broad agreement among people of different worldviews accepting this view of race rather than paleoconservatism or libertarianism or any other type of poltical ‘ism’ as the one concept that unites them. So, should we be calling the alt-right white supremacists and Nazis? I think we should be calling them out as white supremacists. There is no difference between the concepts described by the words ‘alt-right’ and ‘white supremacy’, and white supremacy is the clearer indicator as to what they stand for.

I do not think we should be equating them precisely to Nazis. It unnecessarily invokes Godwin’s Law and therefore further diminishes the horror of what the Nazis did in Europe by instead calling to mind your average left-wing millennial activist’s response to any belief that differs from his view of the world. No, we must distinguish the two concepts of ‘Nazi’ and ‘white supremacist’ if words still have meaning. While it is true that all Nazis are white supremacists, it’s not true that all white supremacists subscribe to the mysticism of the volk, support a one party state, reject parliamentary democracy or support burning undesirable people groups in ovens (some support “peaceful” ethnic cleansing instead, whatever that means).

Calling it white supremacy is preferred, I think. It’s clear, avoids dismissal as hyperbole, and resolutely rejects the alt-right as any sort of legitimate ideology.

This guy is crude, but he hits on a small point I agree with; nuance is lost in our culture, and that that has contributed to a loss of civility in our culture. Facebook is Exhibit A.

The point I’d disagree is where he equates nuance with “holding many truths in our head at once” if by “many truths” that is taken to mean a bunch of different beliefs that may or may not line up with each other. It is entirely possible to have a nuanced worldview that is internally self-consistent. By worldview, I mean all of those beliefs one holds taken together as a whole.

In fact, I would argue that for civil society to be civil, that it is essential for the majority of people in the public square to cultivate an internally consistent worldview that is true. Let me explain why this is so.

Most people concerned with the problem of incivility see the lack of love for their neighbors. It is one of the foundational twin purposes of life; to love your God and to love your neighbor. To love either requires you to adopt of view of truth that defines it as any belief that corresponds to the way the world really is. By doing so, you commit yourself to seeing problems as they really are, which allows you to address the issues at their source; to fight for justice in a way that actually promotes justice, to love your neighbor in a way that is actually loving rather than co-dependent or enabling or damaging. You also eventually end up with a large set of beliefs, or worldview, that are self-consistent with one another.

Without a commitment to believing true things, you leave yourself wide open to believing selfish things; things that seem right to yourself, to the way you feel, but which may not actually correspond to the way the world really is and which tend to be inconsistent with one another. And that is what creates the entire problem because it leads people to act the way that he spells out here: “Stay behind the walls of your team’s fortification, though — ahh, now you will be celebrated, held aloft for your opinion, and all of you will drink and dance in frenzied froth-mouthed glory as you ready your next batch of arrows for THOSE OTHER *bleep* OVER THERE.”

You lose the nuance. But by committing ourselves to believe true things no matter how uncomfortable they may be, we begin to address the incivility of culture by addressing the incivility–the lack of love–within ourselves.

My initial impression: Wow. In a good way. Oh yes, I understand that he stereotypes anyone right-of-center as being impossible to talk with about racism. Hopefully this post serves as a demonstration that that’s not actually an accurate perception of reality, although I acknowledge there is an underlying kernel of truth to it that makes the conclusion seem plausible. So let’s leave that alone and focus on what I found impressive about the blog post.

Matthew 7:1-5 from the Bible comes to mind. It’s when Jesus during his Sermon on the Mount talks about judging and how to do so properly by first taking the log out of your own eye before you remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

Noah is a leftist progressive talking to fellow leftist progressives. He doesn’t explicitly acknowledge any of his own failings in how he has talked about race in the past, so he is not precisely demonstrating Jesus’ command to first take the log out of his own eye. But putting aside the command as it applies to his individual person, and instead looking at what he is doing in this blog post in terms of speaking as a leftist and examining leftist tendencies to do things wrongly, he is.

I believe white American Christians need to do something similar. We need to examine our own attitudes toward race and repent first of those attitudes that lead us into permitting or even causing injustice toward non-whites. I’m not quite sure what that looks like, but I have a gut feeling that we should first start with examining how we treat our non-white Christian brethren. A united church can do a lot to combat racism. So perhaps we ought to start by getting our own house in order.

Finally, Proverbs 15:1 says that “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger”. Noah isn’t accusatory in his blog post but comes across as reasonable. I want to strive to be more like this, and especially here on this blog. Let’s strive to be excellent to each other.

I just saw the two-part season finale of Supergirl last night. It’s amazing how cheesy it is. But maybe that’s a good thing. I’m going to post spoilers, so if you haven’t seen it yet, you may not want to read this.

In the first part, National City gets taken over by Supergirl’s uncle Nod, who uses a mind control ray thingy to zap everyone into zombies who will do his bidding. One of the sort-of-not-a-villain’s ideas to fight Nod is to use a bomb to irradiate the city and break the hold of the mind control ray.

The problem is, it would kill 8% of the population. Supergirl is out of options, until she hits upon the brilliant notion: Give a rousing speech inspiring hope, and that will magically destroy the powers of Nod and restore National City’s citizens to their rightful state of mind. Needless to say she succeeds.

I can hear the trumpet fanfare playing. I can see the building-sized American flag billowing in the background, as Supergirl strikes a pose and looks inspirationally upward and to the left of camera at something we, the beleaguered viewers torn asunder with the worries and trials of our daily lives, cannot see.

The cheeseball factor of this show is just off the charts.

But that’s a good thing. Look, I get it. It’s not realistic. But that’s actually the charm of a lot of these DC comic book shows. Look at the state of the world today. Heck, even just the United States. We’re not doing too good. We need shows that are cheeseball if they also inspire hope.

The hope of Supergirl is amazingly unrealistic. And yet, we need to see universes where that is possible, and where that does happen as a regular occurrence.

The reason being is because it doesn’t happen here. What these kinds of shows do is inspire our moral imaginations to believe that such a world could exist. I have imagined giving a passionate speech that stirs the hearts of men, that persuades them to do something that is reasonable, just, and good. It is in part what inspired me to start this blog. This show makes me want to do that for others.

What is more conservative than the conservation of hope that things could get better? That not just our country, but our families and friends can survive the moral collapse of both major political parties, wars, economic strife, and social chaos? We need more shows and other media like Supergirl, because they’re what help keep our own hope alive and inspire us to carry on when things get bad.

And that’s the genius of this show, really. Because when Supergirl is talking to that TV camera, giving her speech of hope to wake the citizens of National City out of their trance, she’s not talking to fictional zombie people. She’s talking to us, who are in many respects in the same state of mind. It’s so meta. And that’s what makes it awesome.

And it is a sea change. Indiana going to Trump is as good a dividing line as any, since it pushes him from “unlikely frontrunner” to “presumptive Republican nominee” status. And in American party politics, the leader of the party is always the man most recently nominated for President, win or lose.

So I will just say it. The Republican Party has changed this week from one dedicated to Burkean small-government conservatism that seeks ordered liberty for all to one defined by nationalism, big-government protectionism, and populism. There are many reasons this has happened, and few are blameless. But it has happened. So what is the crux of the matter?

Nationalist Populism is a rebuke of conservatism. It seeks raw power for power’s sake, and in order to gain it, it sacrifices principle to popular whim and will tolerate and promote anything that will enable it to achieve power–from racism to fear of “the other” to moral anarchy. It is not the only ideology popular today that does so, but it is currently the one held by the presumptive leader of the Republicans.

Most people were raised to see politics as a war of “sides”, and I’m no exception. So it is tempting to think we (that is, those of you who are similarly inclined) can deal with four years of this. But principles apply to everything. They must apply to how I respond to Donald Trump’s rise. And so what else can I do? This election from the Republican side has become a line-in-the-sand moment between Party and Principle. Because Trump’s ideology is so at odds with what Republicans have to-date said they stood for, there is no way to reconcile both. Either way, we lose the battle. We either lose by rejecting Trump and enabling the Democrats to win, or we lose by supporting Trump and sacrificing our principles in order to “save” them. The only choice that remains is how we resolve our private war.

And so, until the party is reformed, it is no longer my party. I counsel anyone who considered voting for any of the other Republican nominees to consider the same. This moment too is a line-in-the-sand moment for you. And because politics has become so pervasive in our society, it will affect how you live the rest of your life.